Knowledge of the Roundup within the Department of Justice prior to July 1995 was very limited. We made a special effort to speak with DOJ personnel, including supervisors, in the Southeast, including Chattanooga, Knoxville, Atlanta, and Birmingham. We spoke with supervisors and senior personnel in DEA, FBI, INS, and United States Attorneys' offices. Except for people who either currently serve or previously served in the Knoxville area, the Roundup was not generally known by DOJ personnel in the Southeast. The managers fell into three general groups: those who had never heard of the Roundup prior to July 1995; those who had heard of the Roundup but did not attend; and those who attended.
Several supervisory agents indicated that they had not heard of the Roundup prior to July 1995. Others had not heard much about it except that they knew it existed. Of the managers or supervisors who had heard of the Roundup before July 1995, none had heard anything about it being a whites-only event or that racist conduct took place. This was consistent with what the line agents in these offices told us. The majority of agents we spoke to in these offices had heard nothing about the Roundup until July 1995 or had only heard that it was a weekend for police officers and beer drinking. Generally, there was not a widely-shared body of information about the Roundup.
A small number of managers, however, had heard of the "wilder side" of the Roundup. Fliers for the Roundup came to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Knoxville each year, but a senior manager in that office discouraged Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSAs) from attending because he had heard that there was heavy drinking, strippers, and persons engaging in extramarital affairs. He encouraged the attorneys to "avoid the appearance of impropriety." We identified only one AUSA from that office who attended. He went in the late 1980s and never stayed overnight at the campground. We located a second AUSA who had been invited in 1994 but, based on the manager's comments, decided not to attend.
An FBI task force coordinator in Florida had paid to attend in 1993 but, after hearing that a Fort Lauderdale officer had written an article about the Roundup in a white supremacist publication, decided not to attend.
A supervisor in the FBI's Birmingham field office was told about the Roundup by some agents in his office. They told him that the local officers who invited them had described the Roundup as involving "cops getting together, running around naked, and drinking beer." He said everyone in the office thought it "sounded absurd" and so no one attended.
Generally, however, where the supervisors were aware of the Roundup they had not heard anything derogatory about it, and they neither encouraged nor discouraged attendance. They generally understood it as a benign event in which they took no interest.
Three supervisors, two from DEA and one from INS, attended the Roundup while they were supervisors. Each of these persons encouraged subordinates to join them at the Roundup. None of these persons believed the Roundup to be a racist event. One specifically instructed his subordinates to take annual leave and use their personal vehicle if they intended to attend the Roundup. As we note above in analyzing the individual attendance of these supervisors, we found none who condoned or tolerated racist conduct.
We found no information that anyone had complained to any managers or supervisors about either the Roundup generally or about any person's attendance at the Roundup. We also found no supervisors who had received any information that the Roundup was either intended to be or was actually a racist event. Thus, we did not find circumstances where supervisors had negative information about the Roundup and failed to act on that information.